The Doctor's Kill List


By Mike Kenwood

Originally published in Celestial Toyroom Issue 484/5

Recently, with Rob Fairclough, I co-authored an episode guide to Callan, the conflicted secret agent and professional killer, including a running total of the number of people he killed (no matter how reluctantly). After some discussion, the Editor of this esteemed publication suggested that, before the Jodie Whittaker Era gets under way, I should try to do the same for the Doctor…

Yes, the Doctor is a gender-fluid individual of peace. Our hero/heroine. Always looking for a non-violent solution, “another way”. That said, there is a “kill list”, and, over many lives, it is long. Trying to compile this accurately is challenging, so what follows will inevitably be something engineers might call a “first pass” — or a builder’s estimate! I expect my choices to be contentious….

I thought I would build this list up in ascending order of deadliness for each of the Doctor’s individual incarnations. I’m also going to confine this analysis strictly to televised stories, and exclude novels, audio, comic strips and short stories.

The least deadly Doctor is the Eighth, with a body count of zero; while the Master is seemingly killed in the TV Movie, the Doctor does actually offer to save him, and anyway he is later “resurrected”.

Momentarily “parking” some issues, the next least deadly Doctor seems to be the Ninth. (NB: The War Doctor precedes this incarnation, but, in spite of the revelations given in The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor, I’ll be sticking with the “conventional” system of numbering Doctors for this essay.) At this point I am going to do what my old teachers always used to advise and start showing my “working”.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Aliens of London/World War Three	Complicit in blowing up 8 Slitheen in Downing Street. (There seem to be 9 on screen. but we later find Margaret escapes.) Complicit in destroying another with vinegar.	4.5	4.5
The Long Game	Complicit in the death of the Jagrafess. He knows Cathica is listening in.	0.5	5
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways	Ignoring the plan that would have slaughtered approximately 400,000 Daleks and billions of humans, which he can’t go through with, the Doctor is complicit with Jack in destroying 1 Dalek (however, see later).	0.5	5.5

There are already areas that people can dispute here, and ground rules to contemplate. Sharp-eyed readers will have seen that in bringing about these deaths, the Doctor is either helped by, or providing advice to others, so, quite arbitrarily I am assuming he is only half responsible for the casualties, and scoring these “complicits” as half points.

There are a number of stories excluded from the list. For example, the Doctor does not kill anybody in Rose — we are not going to make him answerable for what his companions do. In fact, no villains or monsters are really killed in this story at all — the Nestene Consciousness is a collective Intelligence and while its presence on Earth is destroyed, as an entity it lives on. The Autons don’t count as victims either, as they’re mindless here. In the same vein, The End of the World has the Doctor seem vengefully to let Cassandra, the Last Human, die, but she returns in New Earth. Every story I’ve omitted in this analysis has a reason for its exclusion.

Another important point before we run more numbers: as the Doctor’s life includes time travel, it is built on a reality that is periodically shifting and it’s perfectly possible that, due to later events along the Doctor’s timeline, some stories never happened, while the details of others have changed beyond recognition. In this regard, unless it’s been specifically implied within the series that an adventure has been deleted (for example The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End), then I will assume the story did take place in the form we viewed on screen, and count the deaths from the Doctor’s personal perspective.

The next least deadly Doctor seems to be the Fifth. Here are the stats:

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Four to Doomsday	He de-circuits Persuasion. NB: Monarch is shrunken rather than killed.	1	1
The Visitation	Complicit with Nyssa in the destruction of the android as he suggests using the sonic booster to her. We will discount the deaths from the Great Fire of London, as this is clearly an accident.	0.5	1.5
Earthshock	Complicit in destroying 2 androids, and responsible for killing the Cyber Leader.	2	3.5
Snakedance	Tegan's Mara.	1	4.5
Warriors of the Deep	2 Silurians plus, it appears, 17 Sea Devils (a rough head count) — through use of Hexachromite.	19	23.5
Resurrection of the Daleks	Complicit in killing 1 Dalek, and later kills 2 more with explosives and, it appears, a further 4 with the Movellan Virus.	6.5	30
Planet of Fire	Kamelion, an AI. (Artificial Intelligence.)	1	31

The Fifth Doctor, that gentlest of souls, seemingly kills 31 “people” in his televised adventures, averaging at 1.5 people being killed per story over 20 adventures; he kills in only 7 of these, i.e. 35% of them. True, he intends to kill the Master in Planet of Fire, but does not succeed.

Next up, the Fourth Doctor. I thought he would be higher up this league given the ruthless, remote nature seen in his early stories. Seemingly, he mellows once he acquires a robot dog. He kills about 244 people in his televised stories, in 22/42 adventures (52%), an average of ~ 6 people per story.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Robot	The K1 Robot.	1	1
The Sontaran Experiment	Complicit in destroying Styre. He also scrambles Styre’s robot, but it may not be irreversibly damaged.	1	2
Genesis of the Daleks	1 adult Dalek plus an unknown number of embryo mutants. We only see a part of the overall incubator. Assuming the production line churns out 20 Daleks at a time, it’s reasonable to think there are more batches of embryos lined up, ready to go into the travel machines, so call it 100 embryos.	101	103
Revenge of the Cybermen	He uses a Cybermat to kill 2 Cybermen, and is complicit in destroying an estimated further 4 when advising Stevenson on how to steer Vorus’s missile at the Cybership.	4	107
Terror of the Zygons	5 Zygons, killed by the self-destruct, taking the Doctor’s comment in the final episode that there are only 6 of them literally.	5	112
Pyramids of Mars	Sutekh.	1	113
The Brain of Morbius	He kills Solon with cyanide, and is complicit in killing Morbius by overloading his braincase, making it easier for the Sisterhood to finish the monster off.	1.5	114.5
The Seeds of Doom	Complicit in killing 1 Krynoid. Chase’s death is unintentional.	0.5	115
The Face of Evil	1 possessed Tesh, in self-defence.	1	116
The Robots of Death	Complicit with Leela in killing Dask, and with D84 in killing 8 other robots. Kills SV7 himself. As D84 is clearly an AI, the other robots should probably be treated as such too.	5.5	121.5
The Talons of Weng Chiang	Greel himself, plus Mr. Sin, a porcine AI, plus 1 big rat, plus, possibly, complicit with Jago and Litefoot in using their makeshift gas bomb to kill, say 2 Tong servants.	4	125.5
The Horror of Fang Rock	Complicit in killing 1 Rutan, then destroying their Mother Ship, with maybe another 30 Rutans on board — an estimate based on the ship’s apparent size.	30.5	156
The Invisible Enemy	Complicit in killing Lowe and 1 other mutant, instead of knocking them out and curing them. Then there is the question of the Swarm, a grey area. The Nucleus at least counts as an intelligent being. Whether the rest of the Virus should count is another matter. Are there 1000 other talking prawns in the tank along with the Nucleus? Let’s score the virus as a 1.	2	158
Image of the Fendahl	The Fendahl counts as 1 entity. Assuming Thea’s possession is irreversible, he is not responsible for her death. Complicit in Stael’s suicide.	1.5	159.5
Underworld	The fission grenades destroy the Oracle (an AI), 2 cyborgs and about 30 security guards (an estimate). At no point does the Doctor consider the option of using the Tardis to dump the grenades elsewhere.	33	192.5
The Invasion of Time	Imprisoning the Vardans in a Time Loop does not count. He is complicit with Leela in killing 1 Sontaran, and he shoots 2 more himself.	2.5	195
The Ribos Operation	The Graff Vynda K.	1	196
The Pirate Planet	Xanxia, destroyed when the Time Dams and Bridge are blown up. The Mentiads press the detonator but the Doctor and Romana set up the bomb.	0.5	196.5
The Armageddon Factor	The Shadow, and, call it 20 “Mutes” by deflecting missiles onto the Shadow’s base.	21	217.5
Destiny of the Daleks	The Dalek commander plus 13 others by bombs. The Doctor also deactivates 3 Movellans and is complicit with Tyssan in deactivating another, and Romana in deactivating 3 more.	19	236.5
Meglos	How many Gaztaks does it take to steal a Dodecahedron? Getting past a continuity glitch on screen in the last episode, 3 Gazettes are killed in the final explosion. Meglos survived, as did possibly Grugger and Brotadac, as the base is last seen descending into the ground. (Zolfa Thura wasn’t ‘atomised’, as the effects would have been felt on Tigella.)	3	239.5
State of Decay	1 big vampire plus 3 human vampires.	4	243.5

Now onto Six, at ~ 583 deaths. About twice the body count, over far fewer stories. He averages at 53 deaths per adventure, killing in 6/11 (55%) of his stories.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
The Twin Dilemma	Complicit in Mestor’s death.	0.5	0.5
Attack of the Cybermen	Complicit in killing ~ 100 Cybermen — an estimate. He shoots the Controller, and the Cyber Leader (which then shoots another Cyberman). We should also count Varne, and ~ 20 cybernetically rejected slaves when the Tomb is blown up as collateral damage.	73	73.5
Vengeance on Varos	We’ll discount the acid bath as, clearly, he does not push either guard in. We’ll count the guard disintegrated by the Q switch laser soon after the Doctor’s arrival on Varos, plus complicity in killing Quillam, the Chief and 2 other guards.	3	76.5
The Two Doctors	Shockeye (through cyanide) and Chessene (through sabotage of the Briode Nebuliser in the Kartz-Reimer module). Already damaged by Coronic acid, Stike sustains further injuries from trying to operate the module without the Nebuliser, which the Doctor has removed. Although he is killed by his ship’s self-destruct, he may not have lived even if he’d received medical attention.	3	79.5
Revelation of the Daleks	Complicit in blowing up maybe 1000 of Davros’s new Daleks and in destroying 1.	500.5	580
Trial of a Time Lord	He shoots the Raak, but claims this was an accident. Later, he’s complicit with Mel in killing 5 Vervoids (the entire species).	2.5	582.5

Here’s what Twelve looks like. It is interesting to note this Doctor’s persona is a lot like the Third, Fourth and occasionally, the Sixth at times, and he falls near them in the league as well. He has committed ~ 1,031 kills, ~ 29 deaths per televised adventure. Significantly, though, only 4/35 stories — 14% — involve him killing. By that metric, he is the least aggressive Doctor; possibly in reaction to what his preceding incarnations did! His bark is really a lot worse than his bite, unless it comes to Daleks or Cybermen.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Deep Breath	Assuming the Doctor did push the Half-Faced Man out of the escape capsule, this deactivates about 30 hybridised robots. This time, as they have evolved a little from the Clockwork Droids seen previously, we will arbitrarily count them as AIs rather than “mindless” machines.	30	30
The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar	The Doctor admits to knowing what Davros was planning and setting him up, and was fully aware that some of the energy he released would reach the Dalek sewers. This drowns a City of Daleks — maybe 500 of them — in their own “sewage”. Nice.	500	530
Under the Lake/Before the Flood	The Fisher King.	1	531
The Doctor Falls	In his final battle, the Doctor detonates explosives, destroying an estimated 500 Cybermen.	500	1031

The Third Doctor notches up ~ 3,513 kills ~ 146 deaths per televised story and 10/24 (41.67%) of his adventures involve a kill somewhere.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Inferno	The Doctor suggests that the Primords can be killed not just with bullets, but with cold CO2 from fire extinguishers. This makes him complicit in killing Bromley #2, and Stahlman #1; he also kills Bromley #1. We won’t count the Doctor leaving Liz #2, Sutton #2 and Petra #2 to die on the alt-Earth, as, at this point, he’s convinced (possibly mistakenly in light of events on the Cybus Earth) that he can’t take people with him between universes.	2	2
The Mind Of Evil	Complicit in destroying the Parasite.	0.5	2.5
Day of the Daleks	I did wonder if Anat, Monia etc. should be collateral damage here, if their alt-future timeline is undone by the Doctor’s intervention. However, that dystopia must still exist in some version of reality, for the guerrillas to take a bomb back to assassinate Styles in the first place. So the Resistance lives on. Using that logic, we should count the Ogron the Doctor shoots with a disintegrator pistol as a casualty.	1	3.5
The Sea Devils	3 thousand Sea Devils (“There are many thousands of our people in hibernation in this base”).	3000	3003.5
The Mutants	Jaeger, killed by the Doctor’s suicide bomb/Skybase lab sabotage.	1	3004.5
Planet of the Daleks	The Doctor pushes 1 Dalek into the ice lake and is complicit in destroying another. The army of 10,000 Daleks doesn’t count, as they’re simply re-frozen back into hibernation.	2	3006.5
The Green Death	A few hundred maggots and 1 giant fly.	500	3506.5
Death to the Daleks	Complicit in the destruction of the Exxilon City, which the Doctor acknowledges is a “brain”.	0.5	3507
Monster of Peladon	5 Ice Warriors, killed by the Aggedor heat ray.	5	3512
Planet of Spiders	The deaths of the Great One, and all the other Metebelis Spiders are unintentional. It could be argued that, with Sarah, he is complicit in destroying the Spider Queen.	0.5	3512.5

In the above, we could consider discounting the maggots in The Green Death, but as each one probably has intelligence equating to an average mouse, we should include these, and any other creature approximately on/above that level. Another of many arbitrary decisions!

At this point we get to the Tenth Doctor. Responsible for causing ~ 4,932 deaths, ~133 per televised adventures, and, significantly, killing in 18/37 (49%) of his stories. This puts him in a similar league to the First, Second and Third Doctors.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
The Christmas Invasion	The Sycorax Leader.	1	1
Tooth and Claw	Complicit in destroying a Werewolf.	0.5	1.5
School Reunion	Complicit in blowing up a dozen Krillitanes.	6	7.5
Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel	The Doctor kills at least 10 Cybermen with a Tardis power cell, and euthanises another 1, but this is dwarfed by his complicity in destroying a further 7 thousand Cybermen. (“Six and a half thousand units” are quoted to have been upgraded in alt-Battersea at one point, and the process continues for some time after this, with more chambers being constantly opened, so this seems a reasonable figure.)	3511	3518.5
The Idiot’s Lantern	The Wire.	1	3519.5
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit	Complicit in the destruction of the Beast. There is also the collateral damage, as he makes no attempt to save about 40 (now de-possessed) Ood.	41	3560.5
Love and Monsters	Complicit in destroying the Abzorbaloff, as he suggests the idea to Ursula that it can be resisted.	0.5	3561
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday	Daleks and Cybermen are expelled into the Void, but not killed. The Doctor kills 3 semi-converted earpiece humans in Torchwood.	3	3564
The Runaway Bride	The Racnoss’s children. Let’s assume the Racnoss can lay 300 eggs in one go, similar to some spiders on Earth.	300	3864
Smith and Jones	Complicit with Martha in destroying 1 of the Plasmavore’s couriers.	0.5	3864.5
Gridlock	It’s hard to tell how many ‘devolved’ Macra are living under the motorway, but opening the city roof would have affected them. Arbitrarily scored as per their first appearance with the Second Doctor.	25	3889.5
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks	Complicit, with the hybrids that he co-created, in destroying 2 Daleks. Although the Doctor is genuinely shocked that Dalek Caan then kills the hybrids in retaliation, we should still count this as “avoidable collateral damage”, in a similar way to The Evil of the Daleks, as the Doctor must have known there was a risk of this happening. The Daleks claim to have created a thousand hybrids, but only 20 — approximately — are seen up and about on screen. The other 980 are still inert when Caan kills them, and, presumably, have yet to possess any actual consciousness, so we won’t count them.	21	3910.5
The Lazarus Experiment	Lazarus	1	3911.5
Blink	The Doctor’s forward planning permanently freezes 4 Weeping Angels, although he needs Larry and Sally’s help to achieve this.	2	3913.5
The Fires of Pompeii	Complicit, with Donna, in setting off the energy converter, which kills a large group of Pyroviles — assume 30. Plus, we should count the human collateral damage; archaeologists estimate roughly 2000 citizens died due to the Vesuvius eruption.	1015	4928.5
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky	Martha’s clone, which clearly has a separate life of its own.	1	4929.5
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End	Events and dialogue from various stories post The End of Time indicate the timeline in which this adventure occurred is now redundant. So we will score it as zero.	0	4929.5
The Next Doctor	It is similarly implied within the series that this story also un-happened.	0	4929.5
The Waters of Mars	1 Water Zombie, electrocuted. We will also count Adelaide’s suicide as avoidable collateral damage; he’s obviously appalled by it, but he shouldn’t have told her she was destined to die.	2	4931.5
The Day of the Doctor	Complicit in the destruction of 1 Dalek, with two of his other selves. Score this as a third.	0.3	4931.8

The Second and First Doctors are in a similar place to the Third and Tenth. Although it is interesting to note the whimsical Second Doctor has a shocking metric attached to him. Averaging 247 kills per story, he kills in 13/21 (62%) of his adventures, so by that measure he’s the most aggressive Doctor! He racks up a total of ~ 5,191 overall.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
The Power of the Daleks	The Dalek “production line” runs for 45 minutes, assuming those parts of this story occur in more or less real time; Lesterson discovers it is completing Daleks “nine and ten” about 10 minutes into this process. In rough handfuls, taking into account the 3 initial Daleks, there are probably about 50 Daleks around when the Doctor overloads the Vulcan power supply. Nevertheless, at least 1 Dalek is still alive at the end of the story, so maybe we should discount say, 10%, of the Dalek casualties — those at a greater distance from the generator, perhaps, assuming some electrical inverse-square law applies. So call it 45.	45	45
The Moonbase	10 Cybermen are seen marching on the base; they are flung into space, where their power supplies would eventually run down, an action which the Doctor is complicit in. Those Cybermen still inside their spaceships probably survived.	5	50
The Macra Terror	Complicit in the destruction of the Macra colony — assume about 50 big crabs.	25	75
The Faceless Ones	Complicit in the Jenkins Chameleon being killed.	0.5	75.5
The Evil of the Daleks	Actively plans and brings about a Dalek revolution on Skaro, which he believes — wrongly as it later transpires — will be the “final end” for them. It’s hard to tell from the remaining evidence, but in all likelihood at least a similar number of Daleks are destroyed here as on Kembel.	5000	5075.5
The Tomb of the Cybermen	The Doctor secretly cracks the logic code to enter the Tomb; presumably concerned that Klieg will work it out anyway eventually, he feels the need to escalate matters. So, as in the preceding story, here the Doctor again seems to be prepared to risk collateral damage — this time to humans, rather than Friendly Daleks. We should, therefore, count him as complicit in the deaths of both the Cyberman Controller and Toberman. He also destroys 7 Cybermats.	8	5083.5
The Ice Warriors	Complicit in blowing up 4 Ice Warriors through use of the Ioniser.	2	5085.5
Fury from the Deep	The weed appears to have a rudimentary collective intelligence, so count it as 1 entity which he is complicit in killing.	0.5	5086
The Wheel in Space	Complicit in destroying the Servo Robot, and shooting down a Cybership. (Assume 50 Cybermen on board from the apparent size; the ship is bigger than the saucers seen in The Moonbase.) Plus 1 Cyberman that he wrecks with a force field.	26.5	5112.5
The Dominators	Jamie and Cully appear to destroy 6 Quarks (AIs) with the Doctor’s makeshift grenades (complicity). 8 more Quarks and 2 Dominators are killed when their ship explodes after the Doctor planted the atomic seed bomb on board.	13	5125.5
The Invasion	Destroys 1 Cyberman with the Cerebraton Mentor machine and is complicit in UNIT’s use of a warhead to destroy the Cyber mothership. This may, of course, only have a skeleton crew on board as most of their force is already in London. Assume 1000 Cybermen as the ground force; assume 5% (50) stay on the mothership.	26	5151.5
The Krotons	Complicit in the destruction of 2 Krotons.	1	5152.5
The Seeds of Death	The Doctor destroys 2 Ice Warriors with his solar energy contraption, and kills Slaar by deflecting another Ice Warrior’s shot. He is also complicit with Jamie in electrocuting an Ice Warrior and further colludes in destroying the Ice Warrior’s fleet. As there were 7 Ice Warriors, including Slaar, aboard the Martian ship that landed on the moon, and the fleet consists of 10 more ships, this would suggest another 70 Warriors are killed.	38.5	5191

The First Doctor’s list totals to ~ 5,409, a roughly similar total to the Second Doctor, averaging at ~ 193 deaths per story. Significantly, only 6/28 (21%) of his adventures are resolved by him killing, so in that sense he is the second least aggressive Doctor, despite trying to murder a caveman in his first story! Interestingly his victims are nearly all Daleks.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
The Daleks	Complicit in the destruction of 40 Daleks (an estimate) in their City.	20	20
The Dalek Invasion of Earth	Complicit in the destruction of the whole Dalek invasion force on Earth, which appears to consist of an unspecified number of saucers. Let’s assume 3 saucers on Earth in total, which have generally been occupying Britain, mainland Europe and the US — all other world powers having been amongst the “whole continents” that were “wiped out”. Assuming 250 Daleks per ship, that’s 750 Daleks. This may not seem very many on first analysis, but the Third Doctor thinks 10,000 Daleks on Spiridon is the “the greatest Dalek invasion force ever assembled” and enough to “invade the galaxy”, so 750 seems about appropriate.	375	395
The Chase	The Doctor deactivates his robot double and destroys 1 Dalek. The fight between the Daleks and the Mechonoids is not something the Doctor intentionally provokes.	2	397
The Daleks’ Master Plan	An army of 5000 Daleks, plus another 8, killed by the Doctor’s activation of the Time Destructor. We will also count Sara Kingdom as avoidable collateral damage; he warns her to return to the Tardis, but then accepts her help, despite knowing the risk.	5009	5406
The War Machines	WOTAN, an AI. We will also count Krimpton as collateral damage.	2	5408
The Five Doctors	Complicit with Susan in destroying a Dalek, which revises the First Doctor’s score up by 0.5.	0.5	5408.5

Now we go up several orders of magnitude, and things get messy as we approach the top of the league.

We need to consider the special case of the War Doctor. On the Last Day of the Time War, first time around, he does use a weapon of mass destruction to commit an act of dual genocide. Considering this briefly, we’re told 2.47 billion Gallifreyan “children” were wiped out by the use of the Moment. Given Time Lords are a very long-lived race, children might only constitute 1% of the planet’s overall population, so maybe as many as 247 billion Gallifreyan deaths were caused, extrapolating the “adult” component. There are also “10 million” Dalek ships “on fire” (Dalek) and in Bad Wolf we’re told similar ships carry about 2000 Daleks each, which makes a casualty figure of 20 billion Daleks. However, the actual figure could be far higher than this as the War Doctor and the Tenth Doctor both give a figure of a “billion, billion” Daleks attacking the planet. So in the worst case — let’s start writing some of these numbers out in full — the War Doctor may have caused a staggering one quintillion, two hundred and forty-seven billion deaths! No wonder the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors all think this incarnation is beyond the pale, and that the Ninth and Tenth seem to harbour a death wish at times.

However, this genocide was retrospectively undone by events in The Day of The Doctor. So, under my rules, we have to discount it. There were no Gallifreyan casualties, and the Dalek casualties are now self-inflicted, so discounted as well. (If two people are shooting at you and you duck so they end up shooting each other, it’s very unlikely any Court of Law would convict you of murder.) On screen, the War Doctor only kills 4 Daleks, and is complicit with his future selves in destroying a fifth; ironically this puts him second to bottom in the league table. The Day of the Doctor does not just see Gallifrey saved; Clara and the Moment help the Doctor to save himself from committing genocide, even though he won’t regain the memory of this until his Eleventh incarnation. Of course, we’re unaware of what else the War Doctor got up to, as these events are Time-Locked and, therefore, unreachable.

So, with the War Doctor discounted through a technicality, this leaves us with our remaining finalists…

First the Eleventh Doctor. Often a little eccentric and off the wall, he racks up a staggeringly big total. Killing in 15/39 (38%) of his adventures, his tenure sees an estimated twenty-one million, four thousand, four hundred and thirty-two deaths, which is about five hundred and thirty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five kills per story.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
The Lodger	Complicit with Craig and Sophie in destroying a rather inflexible AI.	0.5	0.5
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon	The Doctor intentionally causes an insurrection by humanity against the Silents. Assuming there is 1 Silent for every 20 people on Earth — a rough order of magnitude figure — and given Earth’s population in 1969 was 3.6 billion, that comes to 0.36 billion Silents. Suppose 90% of these flee Earth rather than being killed. That still means the Doctor is complicit in the deaths of 36 million Silents! Obviously the idea that the Kovarian Chapter constituted of 0.36 billion Silents is a little improbable. However, the Doctor treats them as a world wide menace. So having “ruled... since the wheel and the fire”, the Silents may well have been reproducing.	18000000	18000000.5
The Doctor’s Wife	Complicit, with the Tardis, in destroying House. (The death of the possessed Ood was an accident.)	0.5	18000001
The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People	Amy’s Flesh Avatar, which has an independent existence from the original.	1	18000002
A Good Man Goes to War	River implies the Doctor has some responsibility for the collateral damage from the final battle in this story, but it’s hard to see what he could have done differently. We will attribute the destruction of 90% of the Twelfth Cyber Legion to him though. Assuming the size of this legion to be similar to that of 3rd century Roman Legions, we’re looking at between 1000 and 1500 Cybermen. Let’s go with the lower estimate.	900	18000902
The Girl Who Waited	Complicit with Rory in letting “older Amy” die.	0.5	18000902.5
The God Complex	Complicit, with Amy, in destroying the Minotaur creature.	0.5	18000903
Closing Time	Complicit, with Craig, in destroying 6 Cybermen.	3	18000906
The Wedding of River Song	A substantial part of this story never happened, but we should still consider the damaged Dalek that the Doctor steals data from at the start. The charitable interpretation is that he finds it in that condition and then performs euthanasia on it. The darker interpretation is that he abducts, tortures and murders it!	1	18000907
Asylum of the Daleks	The Daleks destroy the Asylum, which contains millions of damaged Daleks, but the Doctor is not really complicit in this act, he is simply trying to preserve his, Amy’s and Rory’s lives. However, he does quite deliberately destroy ‘maybe twenty’ other Daleks.	20	18000927
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship	Solomon and 2 AI robots.	3	18000930
The Power of Three	The Shakri ship interface counts as an AI.	1	18000931
The Rings of Akhaten	Complicit with Clara in destroying the Grandfather.	0.5	18000931.5
Nightmare in Silver	The Doctor is complicit in destroying a planet that has “3 million” reactivated Cybermen on it. (There are no available figures relating to the quantity of fauna that would also have perished.)	1500000	19500931.5
The Day of the Doctor	Complicit in the destruction of 1 Dalek, with 2 of his other selves. Score this as a third.	0.3	19500931.8
The Time of the Doctor	Deaths uncountable: it’s difficult to assess how many fatalities occurred during the 900 year Siege of Trenzalore, or how much the Doctor is personally culpable. Equally, it doesn’t seem to occur to the Doctor, for example, to simply 1) evacuate all the humans from the planet in his Tardis, 2) post a note through the Crack saying “Hi Time Lords, yes, you’ve got the right universe, but don’t try coming in this way” and then 3) seal the Crack up. The Doctor is without his Tardis for 300 years of his stay, so perhaps this, and the fact he believes the war will end with his death, makes him feel he’s locked into events. Irrespectively, at the very least he appears to be complicit in destroying a Cyberlegion (say 1000 Cybermen), and solely responsible, through using some of his new regeneration energy, for obliterating a Dalek saucer, comparable in size to those seen in The Parting of the Ways (so that accounts for another 2000 Daleks). Plus 1000 other casualties from the Papal Mainframe as avoidable collateral damage, killed in all the general fighting. In The Day of the Doctor the Eleventh Doctor states that ‘millions’ die, so let’s say, then, as a random additional estimate, a further 3 million also perished during the Siege; as it was the Doctor’s presence that precipitated this, let’s hold him responsible for half that figure as well.	1503500	21004431.8

So that leaves us with the Seventh Doctor. His total comes to one billion, forty thousand, four hundred and twenty-six deaths, which is two orders of magnitude higher than the Eleventh, averaging at eighty-three million, three hundred and thirty-six thousand, seven hundred and two victims per adventure. Most of these stats are driven by two particular stories, below, where he’s working to premeditated plans, as opposed to the usual desperate improvisation. Overall, he kills in 7/12 (58%) of his stories, putting his ‘aggression factor’ just behind the Second Doctor’s 62%.

Story	Notes	Kills	Total
Paradise Towers	Discounting cleaning robots, the Doctor is complicit in blowing up Kroagnon.	0.5	0.5
Remembrance of the Daleks	He destroys a Dalek Empire on Skaro; Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation  states a billion Daleks were based there, and the Doctor brings about the planet’s vaporisation quite deliberately. (There are no available figures relating to the fauna destroyed.) Plus, 400 Daleks on the mother ship, and 2 from the renegade faction. Plus the entirely avoidable collateral damage — an estimated 17 people overall — stemming from the Doctor’s decision to stash the Hand of Omega on a populated planet in the first place!	1000000419	1000000419.5
The Happiness Patrol	Complicit in destruction of Fifi and the Kandyman.	1	1000000420.5
Silver Nemesis	The 25-year orbit of the Nemesis precipitated both World Wars One and Two, which between them led to about 90 million deaths. As the Doctor seems to have had a choice in where he left the Nemesis, and has made no attempt to move the device, these “collateral damage” deaths could be attributed to him. We might let him off the hook for this, very generously assuming the Nemesis just worsened existing fixed-point historical events slightly. However there are still the “thousands” of Cyberships that are destroyed by the Doctor’s trap. Assume 2000 ships, each with 20 Cybermen on board (a rough guess) — that’s 40,000 Cybermen.	40000	1000040420.5
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy	3 Gods of Ragnarok.	3	1000040423.5
Ghost Light	Light.	1	1000040424.5
The Curse of Fenric	By persuading the Ancient Haemovore to kill both Fenric and herself, he is complicit in both deaths.	1	1000040425.5

Adding everything together, we get the following summary:

Doctor	Totals	Chart Position
Seventh	1,000,040,425.5	1
Eleventh	21,004,431.8	2
First	5408.5	3
Second	5191	4
Tenth	4931.8	5
Third	3512.5	6
Twelfth	1031	7
Sixth	582.5	8
Fourth	243.5	9
Fifth	31	10
Ninth	5.5	11
War	4.3	12
Eighth	0	13
Total	1,021,065,798.9

Altogether, under my system, the Doctor is responsible for approximately one billion, twenty one million, sixty-five thousand and eight hundred deaths, with Daleks, Silents and Cybermen bearing the brunt of the casualties and the Seventh and Eleventh incarnations bearing most of the responsibility.

However… in The Name of the Doctor we see another alt-future timeline, where the Time Lords didn’t send the Eleventh Doctor more regenerations, and he died. Simeon/The Great Intelligence calls the Doctor the “slaughterer of the ten billion”. By the end of his Eleventh life, we can see the Doctor has accumulated about one billion, twenty one million kills. So assuming Simeon isn’t lying, where might the outstanding sum of eight billion, nine hundred and seventy-eight million–odd deaths come from?

The “ten billion” figure is too low for The Last Day of the Time War; even the most conservative estimate puts the casualty figure at twenty billion Daleks. However, it’s also too high for the nine hundred year conflict on Trenzalore (another outside source: Doctor Who: Tales of Trenzalore: The Eleventh Doctor's Last Stand [Doctor Who BBC Paperback] where the Eleventh Doctor says “millions” died [see The Day of the Doctor]), and which Simeon describes as a “minor skirmish”.

Maybe the discrepancy is the result of the War Doctor’s other actions during the Time War; Simeon seems aware of the War and might know some details, despite the Time-Lock. However, another possibility is that this figure comes from a new timeline version of The Parting of the Ways (see the Rose No More article elsewhere on this site), where, with the absence of the Bad Wolf, the four hundred thousand Daleks were destroyed by the Doctor triggering the Delta Wave, an action which would also have devastated all life on Earth.

No details are available in relation to Earth’s fauna of this period, however, the population of the planet in The Long Game is given as ninety-six billion humans. There then followed an economic and social collapse causing “one hundred years of hell”, which, in turn, was succeeded by mass killings perpetrated through the game shows, before, finally, we have the Dalek fleet’s continental carpet bombing of “Europa, Pacifica, the New American Alliance” and “Australasia”. There is no doubt that triggering the Delta Wave would have killed off any survivors on Earth and, consequently, it might be this action that accounts for the differential and brings the Doctor’s Kill List up to Simeon’s ten billion figure.

If so, this would make the Ninth Doctor the most blood-soaked after all, and what’s more, responsible for having fried the brains of approximately eight billion, nine hundred and seventy-eight million, nine hundred and thirty-five thousand, two hundred and thirty-two human beings, the very species the Doctor has promised to protect, defend and champion. A terrible irony.

As Clive observed in Rose, it seems that Death will always follow in the Doctor’s wake.

No Daleks were harmed during the writing of this article.

_______

1. With apologies for using this awful euphemism.

2. Referring to further sources, for once.